Acquisition
Revolution or evolution?
I recently ran across an article in The Financial Times with the headline 'Revolution? What Revolution?'
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Competition adds value to IT contracting
About a year ago, the Federal Computer Acquisition Center (FEDCAC), which is part of the General Service Administration's Federal Technology Service, recompeted a contract for information technology disaster recovery services. The center originally had awarded the contract in 1993, prior to the gro
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Remembering just how bad the bad old days were
On a recent flight, however, my interest was piqued when I glimpsed the celluloid pocket notepad holder of the woman sitting next to me.
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First streamlining, now the results
Ever since 1996, when some scrappy entrepreneurs at the National Institutes of Health and the Transportation Department invented the governmentwide acquisition contract, my hope was that GWACs would serve two important purposes. One was to spread the use of multipleaward task order contracting aut
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A helping hand across the digital divide
One of the highlights of this year's government/industry confab that the Industry Advisory Council (IAC) hosts every October in Richmond, Va., was an awards ceremony of a distinctly different sort. The award winner was not a senior executive in industry or government. It was Isabel Hinojosa, who is
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Clean up GSA service schedule procedures
I yield to nobody in my admiration for the changes in the General Services Administration's information technology contracting operations since 1993. The agency has transformed itself from dinosaur to space warrior. Under the leadership of Roger Johnson and David Barram and in a world where defense
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Removing the oversight roadblock
In the research I've been doing over the past year on organizational change in the procurement system, one question I asked government contracting officials was: What were the most unpopular rules or regulations among contracting professionals in the years before procurement reform?
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Performance-based contracting out of reach
Performancebased contracting for information technology in the federal government contracting for results to which a vendor commits when it signs a contract has a long way to go. Although the government is making progress in asking for specific performanceoriented results, the typical requGMT
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Reward industry for RFP suggestions
I recently attended the second meeting of a group working on introducing better incentives into contracting. Ken Oscar, the Army's senior procurement official, convened the meeting. For an account of the first meeting, see my column in the Aug. 2 issue of FCW. Toward the beginning of the meeting, t
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Try procurement reform, you'll like it
One of the amazing perks of being an academic is the long summer vacation, starting in early June and ending after Labor Day. The day after graduation, faculty jackets and ties come off, and polo shirts and jeans even shorts appear. A professor who so chooses can proceed to spend three months l
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Language shows world-view shift in federal IT
Remember ADP? What veteran of the federal computing scene doesn't? For the benefit of newbies, in federal parlance, ADP was not the name of the company founded by nowSen. Frank Lautenberg (DN.J.) that does payroll processing for businesses. Rather, it stood for 'automatic data processing,' and it
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Army smart to push for contract results
The most important trend in contracting today is a growing recognition that the crucial benefit of procurement reform is giving the government more leeway to structure business arrangements with vendors in a way that increases the chances that contractors will deliver results to government customer
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Auctions the next tool for the federal buyer
An amazing thing happened to me recently. In the span of one week, I received three phone calls from organizations looking to introduce online auctions into federal government buying. Industry hates auctions for one good reason and one bad one. The good reason is that auctions evoke the old, discre
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Public good not always second to politics
Especially outside the Washington, D.C., Beltway, most Americans believe that the idealistic rhetoric appearing in the statements and speeches of senior government officials, filled with concern for the public good, is for public consumption only. Peel the onion, most people assume, and you will re
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Commerce makes commitment to small biz
Before procurement reform, using 8(a)s was almost the only game in town for government agencies to use to award contracts quickly and with a minimum of red tape. This encouraged too many 8(a)s to develop the unfortunate 'business model' of seeking work on the back of an inefficient procurement syst
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Moving the feds from difficult buyer to smart buyer
Traditionally, the federal government has been a difficult buyer. By a difficult buyer I mean one that imposes lots of extra costs and risks of doing business on vendors. Extra costs have included those arising from unique contract clauses, such as Buy American, or governmentunique specifications,
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Use rewards to extend vendors' pacts
Bob Woods, the longtime government information technology manager now working in industry, was talking with me recently about the need to have provisions written into government IT contracts that give better incentives for vendors to deliver results. 'I have a great idea,' he told me. 'It's like ai
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You can learn to be a smart decision-maker
When I was in government, one of the most common questions folks in Washington, D.C., and those back home in Cambridge, Mass., asked me was, "What's the biggest difference between being in government and being in academia?
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